Customer Experience | TLF Research UK Based Customer Experience Consultancy

Sentiment Index: How Do You Think Consumers Are Feeling Now?

By Stephen Hampshire, Client Manager, TLF Research

You may remember that, back in the Spring issue, we launched a new measure of consumer attitudes to their own financial situation and the wider economy – the Index of Consumer Sentiment. In some ways it wasn’t ideally timed, to say the least, but because we had been tracking the measure for some time before we launched it, it does give us a very good picture of how consumer feelings ha...

Your Customers' Spending Habits Are Changing

By Nigel Hill, Chairman, TLF Research

What’s happening to jobs? In short, they’re starting to disappear. In May 3/4 of respondents had a job but now it’s only 2/3. Those still in a job are more likely to be travelling to their normal place of work, up from 22% to 38%. This isn’t due to fewer people working from home, which has only fallen marginally from 42% to 38%, but down to a big drop in those on full time ...

How Healthy Is Your Brand?

By Tom Kiralfy, Panel Manager, TLF Research

New for 2020 At TLF, we’ve been running surveys for longer than most of us care to remember. We’re experts in customer satisfaction, and tackle a multitude of different survey topics day in, day out. The world we immerse ourselves in, that of market research, is ever-changing. With new technology comes new ways in which we can interact with people, and that changes peoples’ expec...

How Contact Agents Can Respond To Current Challenges

By Ian Moyse, EMEA Director, Natterbox

For those in the world of customer service, taking work home has been a big challenge to overcome. Contact agents, synonymous with working in call centres, have been badly hit, with concerns being voiced over the social distancing measures available1 in offices. It is therefore vital that organisations recognise the new challenges that call agents are forced to deal with and offer them the tools a...

Whose Bias Is It Anyway?

By Stephen Hampshire, Client Manager, TLF Research

In September Pegasystems and UCL ran a virtual roundtable on the topic “Do AI biases and human biases overlap more than we think?”, presented by Peter van der Putten (an assistant professor of AI at Leiden University and director at Pegasystems) and Dr Lasana Harris (Senior Lecturer in Social Cognition at UCL). It’s interesting to hear from the experts about both the potential an...

ContactEngine

By Mark K. Smith, CEO, ContactEngine

In recent editions we’ve featured a series of articles from the Natural Language Understanding experts at ContactEngine. The more we found out about the company, the more interesting we found their slightly leftfield take on the role of Machine Learning and AI in the customer experience, so we sat down with their charismatic CEO Prof. Mark K. Smith to find out more about ContactEngine, proac...

How Consumers Create Brand Meaning

By Chris Barnham, Chris Barnham Research Ltd

The marketing world has a peculiarly ineffective way of thinking about how consumers make meaning. This failure is particularly surprising because marketing, of all professions, believes it is in the very business of meaning-making. To draw an analogy, the situation in the marketing profession is akin to the car industry making cars, but not being able to build an internal combustion engine. Of co...

Qualitative Semiotics For CX

By Stephen Hampshire, Client Manager, TLF Research

We’re fascinated by the potential of qualitative semiotics, and Chris Barnham’s article does a really good job of explaining what it is, how it works, and how you can use it to explore the way consumers build their images of brands. In this short article, I want to look at how that same approach might be used when thinking about the way meaning is created in the customer experience. A ...

Now, Next and Later: Customer Relationships at Interserve

By Iain Shorthose, Director of Customer & Workplace Experience, Interserve

Now is a good time for all businesses to reflect on our priorities, our ways of working, and the nature of our relationships with customers. Will the pandemic change things forever, or will we go back to business as usual? How may customer needs, both practical and emotional, have shifted? What do we need to do to make sure that we meet those needs and keep our people safe? We caught up with Iain ...

Understanding Algorithms: How Content Gets Into Your Newsfeed and Why You Should Take Advantage of This

By Andrew Davis, Digital Consultant & Workshop Leader

There are 5 ways people will find your content on the Internet: Searching with keywords or phrases. You shared something and it appeared on their timeline. Paid advertising Going to a direct URL i.e. www.yourwebsite.co.uk They found it by accident, or in other words: the algorithm of the platform showed it to them. What is important about the last point is if we have an understanding of how al...

Online Communities and the Benefits of Engaging Digitally

By Debs Binks, Client Manager, TLF Research

For good or ill, there’s no escaping that the internet has changed the way that we interact with the world. Where once talking to people, whether in person or by telephone, used to take precedence; many of us now feel it natural to message people instead, using email or text messages. In more recent years we’ve also experienced a shift to communicating digitally, whether it be through ...

How to Walk the CX Tightrope

By Tom Libretto, Chief Marketing Officer and Senior Vice President, Pega

For most of us, the idea of walking a tightrope with no safety net to break our fall would be our worst nightmare. Add to the mix unwelcome noises, a strong wind, and other distractions, and you might think, even for the most experienced performer, that getting to the other side is nearly impossible. The key to not tumbling into the abyss is to block out the distractions. Similarly, those individu...

UKCSI Summer 2020

The UKCSI is an independent, national benchmark of customer satisfaction published each January and July across 13 sectors of the UK, conducted by The Institute of Customer Service. The UKCSI measures customers’ experiences and relationships with organisations on 26 metrics which are based on customer priorities. For over a decade it has provided us with a biannual snapshot of how UK c...

Customer Service During the Lockdown: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly

By Nigel Hill, Chairman, TLF Research

We have completed 3 surveys with TLF Panel during the lockdown, mainly to track how the lockdown has affected their lives and changed their attitudes and priorities. In the most recent survey we also asked panellists whether they had received any particularly good, or bad, customer service, asking them to provide details. Over 1,500 people from all over the UK completed the survey and on re-readin...

Igloo: In It For The Long Term

By Rebecca Smith, Director of Service and Culture at Igloo

Energy companies don’t have a great reputation for customer experience. The Utilities sector performs poorly in benchmarks such as the Institute of Customer Service’s UKCSI, and most people would tell you that companies prioritise acquisition over retention, tempting customers in with attractive tariffs while taking advantage of existing customers. Igloo, a relatively new provider whic...

Goodwood: An English Estate Like No Other

By Rachel Allen, Client Manager, TLF Research

Based on a recommendation, Goodwood approached TLF in 2019 to talk to us about conducting an employee survey. It was, of course, fabulous to be recommended. We are always delighted when our clients spread the word. It was clear that Goodwood had a definite and clear vision of what they were looking for and how the results would be used to drive change. However, within that framework they were very...

Swearing In Context

By Euan Matthews, Director of AI and Innovation, Contact Engine

"NEW HOPE FOR THE WORLD. GOD BLESS AMERICA AND OUR HOMES. HAVE NO SWEARING, BOYCOTT PROFANITY! PLEASE DO NOT SWEAR, NOR USE OBSCENE OR PROFANE LANGUAGE. THESE CARDS ARE FOR DISTRIBUTION. SEND FOR SOME - THEY ARE FREE." - 185 E 76 st New York, N.Y. If you were given a pink card with the message to the left a hundred years ago, it meant the Anti-Profanity League has been alerted to your vulgar langu...

How Do You Think Customers Are Feeling?

By Tom Kiralfy, Panel Manager, TLF Panel

It’s sometimes hard to have faith in the “wisdom of the crowd”, but there is one thing that people are reliably good at—telling you how they feel. They’re not always very good at explaining why they feel like that, which can be frustrating, but knowing how they feel means that we can come closer to understanding their behaviour, and make better decisions as a result. ...

The Chief Insights Officer: It's About Way More Than Data

By Janelle Estes, Chief Insights Officer, UserTesting

Many companies now have data dependence baked into their DNA. They collect and mine vast amounts of information on customers and prospects to uncover trends, patterns, and opportunities to sell products and services across multiple touchpoints. “Data obsession” is a thing. Google the term and the search engine returns page after page. All of this increased reliance on customer data has...

10 Free Marketing Tools To Help You In The Digital World

By Andrew Davis, Digital Consultant & Workshop Leader

Whenever I am doing any training workshops, regardless of the industry or skill level, everyone loves it when I talk about the tools that are available. Finding digital tools that can help you with your job or even your life is great, especially when they’re free! I love finding good free tools. In fact, I put together a guide on my website with over 500 free tools that I update every few mo...

HouseMark's New STAR Framework

By Stephen Hampshire, Client Manager, TLF Research

In January HouseMark published its decisions on a new framework for STAR, based on extensive consultation and review involving 300 landlords and over 13,000 tenants and leaseholders. STAR, for those who are not familiar with the sector, is a framework which allows social landlords to benchmark their customer satisfaction against other landlords. While not totally prescriptive, it sets out requirem...

Is Consumer Confidence Rational?

By Nigel Hill, Chairman, TLF Research

As reported earlier in Customer Insight the TLF Sentiment Index showed a big increase in January especially for business conditions and the overall UK economy, but also, to a slightly lesser extent, for people’s own personal finances. This is confirmed by other polls especially the post-election business polls from the IoD and the CBI which both showed big increases as well as the PwC consum...

Lighting the Way with Qualitative Insight

By Stephen Hampshire, Client Manager, TLF Research

At TLF, we’ve started talking about how organisations should structure a customer experience improvement programme in terms of four stages. The first, and perhaps the least well understood, is what we call “understand & explore”, which is where we use qualitative research to explore and better understand the customer experience. It’s the first stage because it's the fir...

Visual Thinking for Customer Centricity

By Stuart Young, Innovation Practice Lead at Radtac

90% of information transmitted to the brain is visual, so isn’t it time you opted for a simpler and quicker way to tell a compelling customer story in a way that will stick? The written word alone can create a level of uncertainty and ambiguity. This is where the power of visualisation can play a fundamental role. Visual thinking is becoming ever so popular yet there is still so much untappe...

5 Ways for High Street Retailers to Drive Footfall

By Michael Rolph, CEO at Yoyo

The widespread impact of digital disruption is reported almost daily, but perhaps nowhere is its impact felt more than on the high street. Retailers are under particular threat from the relentless growth of pure ecommerce players, who are able to offer unparalleled convenience and competitive costs. Ever-changing business rates and low consumer confidence do little to relieve the plight of high st...

Are We as Gullible as Ever?

By Nigel Hill, Chairman, TLF Research

The media love to make us laugh by showing us ads from bygone times that supposedly demonstrate how our simplistic ancestors would believe anything the nasty manipulative advertisers told them. Amazing panaceas in Victorian times that would cure anything from a head cold to arthritis. Smiling housewives with perfect families on early TV ads like the Oxo series starring 'Katie' and 'Philip'. Everyt...

Swearing for Robots 101

By Eleanor Southern-Wilkins, Linguistic Specialist, in partnership with Euan Matthews, Director of AI and Innovation at ContactEngine.

Dear reader: consider, if you will, the difference between “this is shit” and “this is the shit”. What do they mean? Both contain a Rude Word, yet their intentions are different. One is very negative; the other is very positive. Consider also “fuck you” versus “fuck me”. “Fuck you”? Extremely rude! And very unlikely to be positive. &ldqu...

Give Yourself a Fighting Chance by Writing a Great Research Brief

By Rachel Allen, Client Manager, TLF Research

At TLF, as you might expect, we receive quite a number of research briefs and tender documents. Not every project we conduct is the result of a formal briefing document, and we don’t always need one. Sometimes a couple of calls is all we need to get us on our way to producing a great piece of research that gives our clients what they need. That said, some organisations employ a more formal p...

Driver Analysis � Are You Answering the Right Question?

By Stephen Hampshire, Client Manager, TLF Research

“Driver analysis” is a term which describes a set of related techniques that can be used to help organisations know which elements of the customer experience have most impact on crucial outcomes such as overall satisfaction, recommendation or NPS, and loyalty behaviours such as retention. The different techniques available have different strengths and weaknesses, and unfortunately cust...

Irish Life

"All the struggles and contests that I ever fought seem only playful games now..."1 Irish Life is an organisation we’ve followed for a long time in these pages. This is the third case study we’ve featured on the Irish provider of life assurance, health insurance, pensions and investments. That in itself reveals one of the secrets to their success – sustained commitment over the l...

From Service To Loyalty

By Chris Daffy, of Europe�s best-known customer service fanatics. He is a Companion of the Institute of Customer Service, and founder of The Academy of Service Excellence. His experience and expertise has taken him all over the world as a consultant and conference speaker and enabled him to work with organisations as varied as 3M, Airbus, Air Products, AXA, BAE Systems, Brenntag, BT, DLA Piper, Dorchester Group, ING Group, JCB, Microsoft, Pizza Express, Toyota, Watches of Switzerland, Vaillant & Xerox.

Research now shows that many of the various programmes organisations are undertaking to use customer service to improve business performance and results fail to achieve the planned outcomes. For example, just a few months ago, Bob Thompson the founder of CustomerThink Corporation in America, wrote an article entitled ‘An Inconvenient Truth: 93% of Customer Experience Initiatives are Failing ...

Customer Survey FAQs

By Rachel Allen, Client Manager, TLF Research

You might find yourself in a situation where, despite your enthusiasm, internal stakeholders are sceptical about outsourcing your survey to an agency. In this article, I will take you through some of the challenges and questions that you are likely to face and how you might respond to provide reassurance. Some stakeholders may feel anxious or concerned about customer surveys and securing ‘bu...

Influencer Marketing and Customer Experience

By Andrew Davis, Digital Consultant & Workshop Leader

Social media can be divided into many different areas from advertising to content market and community management. However, due to its word of mouth nature, influencer marketing has emerged and established itself as one of the most lucrative tactics, if done correctly. “Who are you most likely to believe? A company website that says their product is the greatest thing since sliced bread or s...

Clicks and Mortar

By Tom Kiralfy, Panel Manager, TLF Research

If the news is to be believed, we could lose the – once mighty – retail juggernaut that is the British high street within the next 10 to 15 years. This seems a little pessimistic to me - as anyone that has been to a city centre recently will tell you, they’re still buzzing. What it does highlight though, and the 20 or so major retail closures so far this year will testify to this...

How do you Answer NPS?

By Stephen Hampshire, Client Manager, TLF Research

If you work in customer experience or customer insight it’s a fair bet that you’ve spent a bit of time wondering how to ask NPS. How should the question be worded? Should it be relationship or transactional? At the front of the survey or the end? 0-10 or 1-10? But how much time have you spent thinking about how you answer it? If you’re like me, you may have noticed that when you&...

Capturing the Customer Voice in the Housing Sector

One of the challenges of satisfaction measurement, in any sector, is how best to balance the need for a survey to reflect the unique needs of each organisation’s customers with the need for a comparable benchmark. The established satisfaction benchmark for the housing sector has been, for many years, the STAR methodology developed by HouseMark. Now, after a significant period of resear...

Targeting

By Nigel Hill, Chairman, TLF Research

A few years ago, soon after my 50th birthday, I remember being ashamed when a copy of the Saga magazine landed on the doormat. “Hide it quick unless anyone sees it!” However, insulted though I was, I had to admire the brilliant marketing. Knowing I had turned 50 was easy enough but I had to admit that the magazine itself was a master stroke. Glossy, well designed and packed with good j...

Staycation vs Vacation

By Tom Kiralfy, Panel Manager, TLF Research

With holiday season well and truly upon us, we decided to see if the warm spells we’ve been having across the UK (this year we had the hottest Easter Monday on record) have influenced people’s decisions as to how they’ll be spending their time away this year from how often they’ll be going away, to how they’ll be booking their holiday, from where they’ll be goin...

BeerBods: More People Drinking Better Beer

By Stephen Hampshire, Client Manager

Craft beer and subscription models are both huge trends right now, and they’re brought together in the beer subscription club BeerBods. We caught up with founder Matt Lane to talk about his approach to business, the strengths of the club model, and the company’s crowdfunding success. The BeerBods story The growth of the craft beer industry shows (thank goodness) no sign of slowing, eve...

New Models, New Experiences, and the Primacy of Customer Experience

By Stephen Hampshire, Client Manager, TLF Research

It feels like we’ve been reading about the switch from product to service for a long time. Even in the late 90s the most admired business leaders were saying things like “We’re not in the X business, we’re in the service business” while everyone nodded along. Which makes you wonder—is there anything significantly new about the sudden explosion of subscription mo...

Gousto: A Delicious Twist

Gousto is a subscription recipe box company, aiming to “deliver inspiration to every home-cook”. Founded in 2012, it has grown from four to over 500 employees, and has secured £75 million in investment. It has ambitious plans for the future, too—delivering almost 2 million meals every month, Gousto is on track to help UK families serve up 400 million meals by 2025. Customer...

Simple but Not Easy - Using Digital to Engage

By Andrew Davis, Digital Consultant & Workshop Leader

Organisations in every sector are scrambling to figure out how to use digital tools to raise their profile, win new business, and engage with existing customers. There’s a profusion of tools and approaches and a never-ending supply of “gurus” and “thought leaders” purporting to tell you how to do it best. It can all be a little overwhelming, and many of us suspect tha...

Fill Onboarding �Potholes� To Transform Customer Journeys

By Dermot McCauley, Vice President, Solutions Product Marketing, Kofax

In an age of “click and get it done,” customers are conditioned to expect business interactions to be simple, speedy and convenient. Applying for a credit card, for example, should be as seamless as snapping and sharing a photo from a smartphone. But if a business asks you to send documents by fax, email or mail/post? That’s very frustrating. Proving identity shouldn’t be s...

Self-Service Till Rage

By Nigel Hill, Chairman, TLF Research

Is it the new road rage? I’m sure if I logged rage episodes per hour self-service till rage would out-distance road rage by some margin. Just last week I was in the M&S on Sheffield station getting myself some food for the train. Until recently there were 3 normal checkouts, with 2 of them usually manned, and 3 self-service checkouts. Now there is 1 normal checkout, seemingly un-manned u...

Nordstrom Reinvent the High Street

By Nigel Hill, Chairman, TLF Research

Nordstrom Local's 3 Los Angeles stores have everything...Except products! Most retailers, especially department stores, need to adapt to compete with online shopping. Nordstrom seems to have cottoned onto this before most. Its three recently-opened Nordstrom Local stores in Los Angeles are not retail shops as much as experiential locations that offer services like tailoring, manicures, returns, sa...

January 2019 UKCSI

By Sarah Stainthorpe, Client Manager, TLF Research

The UKCSI is the benchmark measure of customer satisfaction across 13 sectors of the UK economy, conducted by The Institute of Customer Service. For over a decade it has provided us with a biannual snapshot of how UK consumers are feeling. The Institute tell us that “The UK Customer Satisfaction Index gives a unique insight into the quality of customer service in your sector. So you can see ...

Fortune: The World's Most Admired Companies

By Stephen Hampshire, Client Manager, TLF Research

Every year since 1997 FORTUNE has published a list of the world’s most admired companies. The full list is available at: http://fortune.com/worlds-most-admired-companies. We thought it would be interesting to take a look at the top 10, and unpack what it is that makes them so admired. How do the FORTUNE results tally with other sources of information such as customer satisfaction benchm...

Gradually then Suddenly

By Stephen Hampshire, Client Manager, TLF Research

Culture change is something every business needs, but it can be frustratingly hard to pin down the best way to go about doing it. At TLF’s 2018 Client Conference I did my best to clarify what culture means, and to present some evidence on how to change it. I took the phrase “Gradually, then suddenly” from an Ernest Hemingway novel, in which someone explains how they went bankrupt...

Get To It!

By Rachel Allen, Client Manager, TLF Research

Missing [in]action In earlier issues of Customer Insight magazine I’ve written about the importance of encouraging customers to take part in your surveys by warming them up. An important element of the warm up is letting customers know that taking part is going to benefit them in the end because improvements will be made based on their feedback. This is the incentive for them to take ...

Evolution Revolution: TLF Client Conference 2018

By Stephen Hampshire, Client Manager, TLF Research

In March we gathered, once again, at One Great George Street in London for our annual client conference. It’s one of our favourite days of the year, despite the nerves and inevitable (hopefully invisible) minor backstage disasters. It’s a chance for our clients to meet each other, hear from an inspirational keynote speaker, and learn lessons from some client case studies. We also enjoy...

CX World Tour

By Andy Butler, Client Manager, TLF Research

Working in customer experience is a fascinating line of work – but at times it can also be so frustrating. It’s fascinating as, in measuring customer experience and helping organisations drive changes that enhance the customer journey; I fully understand the value this can have for customers and for a business. But frustrating when every day I see customer experience fails - surely it ...

Why Should I Come To Your Store?

By Nigel Hill, Chairman, TLF Research

It’s 70 years since the first self-service supermarket opened in the UK. Even though it was over 30 years behind its arrival in America some members of the British public were far from prepared. There were reports that one frustrated shopper annoyed at having to select her own shopping threw a basket at Alan Sainsbury, grandson of founder John James Sainsbury and the brains behind the introd...

Biffa: Superbrand, So What?

By Guy Maddock, Group Head of Marketing, Biffa

Biffa was recently recognised as a UK business Superbrand. But what does this mean and how should a brand use this information within its own commercial activities? From the outset I should state that Biffa is not a sexy brand, and it certainly doesn’t operate in a sexy sector, and yet for the 11th consecutive year Biffa was identified in the annual Superbrands index as the UK’s No.1 b...

Nationwide: Making the Connection

By Stephen Hampshire, Client Manager, TLF Research

Using technology to get closer to customers It’s hard to avoid coverage of the impact of technology on customer experience. Whether it’s AI, digital channels, or augmented reality, technology is mounting an assault on the traditions of customer service. Too often this is billed as being in opposition to the human-to-human interactions of traditional customer service: AI will replace ag...

Mapping The Customer Journey

By Stephen Hampshire, Client Manager, TLF Research

All of a sudden, everyone is Mapping The Customer Journey. It’s a concept that has been around in customer research for decades, but its recent rise to prominence may be linked to the success of service design thinking. Why is it so hot right now? Done well it has the ability to drive quick changes to organisations’ processes, culture, and frontline behaviour based on a customer-led vi...

TLF Customer Experience Conference 2017

By Stephen Hampshire, Client Manager, TLF Research

In March we hosted our Annual Client Conference in London, returning to One Great George Street’s impressive Brunel lecture theatre and Great Hall. Whether they’ll let us back after Rob built a campfire on stage is another question…but more on that later. The conference is our chance to get clients together to share ideas, to learn from each other, and to be inspired. This year ...

Customer Journey Mapping in Social Housing

By Andy Butler, Client Manager, TLF Research

As housing associations continue to refine services to improve the customer experience, customer journey mapping is increasingly used as a valuable insight tool which can aid the redesign of such services. Here we explore journey mapping and the value it can provide housing associations. What is a Customer Journey Map? Put simply, it is a diagram, in order, of the important touchpoints...

Loyalty: The Blueprint to Success

By Nigel Hill, Chairman, TLF Research

Customers across many companies feel aggrieved that their loyalty is not rewarded – hardly surprising when they see new customers getting all the best offers. This is not the scenario at Huddersfield Town Association Football Club (HTAFC) where the entire commercial strategy is based on rewarding loyalty. Here are some of the most eye catching examples. The Premiership Pledge Back in 2010 HT...

16th Annual Customer Experience Conference

By Greg Roche, Director, TLF Research

Almost 200 people gathered together at One Great George Street between the Houses of Parliament and Horse Guards Parade for TLF’s 16th Annual Customer Experience Conference. It was the 4th consecutive year for the venue, home to the Institution of Civil Engineers. Anyone who’s seen the amazing Georgian interiors will know why delegates rate this higher than any other venue on the post-...

Competitor Analysis

By TLF Research

Customers tend to benchmark organisations very widely, comparing them with their experiences across many different sectors. Often customers’ recent experience is limited to one organisation per sector. They simply don’t currently deal with more than one local council, one mortgage lender, one mobile phone provider or one housing association. At other times, however, customers are much...

Warming Up

By Rachel Allen, Client Manager, TLF Research

Improve response rates and quality of response through effective pre-survey communications. A well executed warm up campaign will make your survey more cost effective by shortening the field work period (achieving interviews or responses more quickly) and increasing the response rate. It could also stimulate response from a wider range of customers, generating a more representative result and imp...

Financial Services Complaints Management Forum

By Iain Law, Client Manager, TLF Research

At the start of the 14th annual Financial Services Complaints Management Forum the FCA provided an update on their complaints reporting requirements, which will be implemented in June 2016.These are the main points:- An extension of the ‘next business day rule’, where firms are permitted to handle complaints less formally, without sending a final response letter, to the close of ...

Omnichannel

By Nick Mitchell, Managing Director, EMEA at [24]7

Why it’s time for customer service to go omnichannelIt’s well recognised that consumers are increasingly choosing to use many different communication channels when transacting with customers. A survey at the end of 2013 for CRM software specialists Zendesk of 7,000 consumers in 7 countries showed that 67% of online shoppers had made purchases that involved multiple channels in the prev...

Why Do Companies Never Learn?

By Nigel Hill, Founder of TLF Research and Editor of Customer Insight

When you’ve been in this game as long as I have you do wonder sometimes how companies can just keep on making the same mistakes over and over again. In the name of performance improvement they spend vast amounts of money on consultants, training, learning but still make schoolboy errors when it comes to getting the basics right.To illustrate, I’m going to depart from my norm...

Satisfying the High Rollers

by TLF Research

Does being a high roller guarantee better service and therefore mean you are more likely to be a satisfied customer? The simple and straightforward answer would seem to be yes. Picture Richard Gere in Pretty Woman producing his exclusive, unlimited credit card and the ensuing service borne only of those who sense a big tip is in the air. However scratch the surface of service in these platinum pla...

How impressed is your board when you present survey results?

By Darren Wake, Business Development Manager, TLF Research

Yes I do know they’re not easy to impress, but do we always help ourselves by the way we present results from customer surveys? I think the problem stems from the fact that the people responsible for the surveys (whether research agencies or company managers) are immersed in the detail of the survey, keen to tell the full story and too obsessed with demonstrating the credibility / statistica...

Why Do Customers Switch

By TLF Research

In September 2011 I took a family holiday in Turkey with a leading tour operator. The sun shone, the 5 star hotel was clean and well appointed, the food fantastic and my children loved it. All in all a recipe for the perfect holiday, one very happy customer you might think and a guaranteed repeat booking for next year...or maybe not?A recent study by the Institute for Customer Service says f...

Bringing the Voice of the Customer into the Boardroom

By TLF Research

One of the biggest frustrations of customer insight and customer contact staff is how to convey customers’ views to senior management in a way that makes them sit up and take notice. It’s difficult with statistics, almost impossible with reports – and please don’t show me another PowerPoint presentation!! Of course, for some time it’s been possible to video customers....

Storytelling Maximising the Impact of Customer Research

By Iain Law, Client Manager, TLF Research

Research has been commissioned and insight identified but getting individuals to change their behaviours in order to produce an improved customer experience has proven to be more difficult. Does this scenario sound familiar?Experience has shown that ‘Storytelling’ can be an extremely useful tool for organisations to maximise the impact of customer research. Within this article we aim t...

Selecting the Best Survey Method - Part 1

By Sarah Stainthorpe, Client Manager, TLF Research

Current technology has multiplied the number of ways to collect customer feedback, often making it confusing to work out the best way to carry out customer research. Sarah Stainthorpe provides a summary of the different types of research and their purposes, as well as the pros and cons of different ways of obtaining customer feedback. Underlying attitudes or transaction specific? Fundamentall...

Selecting the Best Survey Method - Part 2

By Sarah Stainthorpe, Client Manager, TLF Research

Research - Selecting the best survey method In the last edition of Stakeholder Satisfaction we discussed the pros and cons of different survey methods. In this article, we will go into more detail about some of the latest self-completion methods, which we had said were useful for conducting transactional customer experience research in particular The three types of self-completion survey method we...

Co-creation - Part 2 Value through choice

By TLF Research

Co-creaction - Part 2 Value through choice Some trends over the last couple of decades are well known. Exponential technological innovation has led to huge efficiency savings enabling firms to provide better value to customers. But they’ve had to because customers’ unprecedented access to information and easy networking with other customers has turned them into expert and confident buy...

Co-creation - Part 3 of the new cutomer experience

By Stephen Hampshire, Client Manager, TLF Research

Co-creationPart 3: With customers not at customersThis article, the third in our series on co-creation is based on Stephen Hampshire’s presentation at The Leadership Factor conference in Manchester in March 2010.The basic purpose of co-creation is to help all businesses to engage more closely with their customers. I’m going to focus on three aspects of co-creation:why co-creation is di...

Fast Guide - Attitudes and behaviours

By TLF Research

Fast Guide - Attitudes and behaviour Many organisations fail to manage customers effectively because they don’t distinguish between customers’ attitudes and behaviour. Both are relevant to customer satisfaction and loyalty, but they’re different concepts requiring different information and decision making. Since it’s behaviours that deliver financial benefits we will examin...

Customer - Loyalty: customer insight or sales promotion?

By Nigel Hill, Founder of TLF Research and Editor of Customer Insight

In November 2004, Hurricane Frances was rushing towards the Florida coastline. Some residents were already in their cars heading inland. Much further inland in Bentonville, Arkansas, there was also much activity in the Wal-Mart office as CIO Linda Dillman encouraged staff to take advantage of the company’s ‘predictive technology’. With almost 4,000 stores in the US and around 100...

Research - Interviewing hard to reach customers

By TLF Research

One of the main aspects of b2b research that distinguishes it from b2c is the greater difficulty of securing a response, whether the survey is self-completion or interviews. The most challenging task for researchers, however, is to interview certain hard to reach b2b audiences on the telephone. This is the main reason why b2b surveys cost more than b2c, but often research budgets still don’t...

The Voice of the Customer

BY Nigel Hill, Client Manager, TLF Research

These days few company bosses would disagree with the words of Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton:"There is only one boss. The customer. And he can fire everyone in the company from the Chairman down, simply by spending money somewhere else."So everybody’s interested in the Voice of the Customer but what exactly does it mean? Sam Walton was very clear about the goal – customers spending money...

A great customer experience... Through The Customers' Eyes

By Nigel Hill, Founder of TLF Research and Editor of Customer Insight

A few years ago we all used to talk about satisfying customers and improving customer satisfaction and loyalty. Today, some of the latest buzzwords that we are encouraged to strive for include delighting rather than satisfying customers, build a relationship with customers, improve customers’ emotional engagement with your company and even deliver a customer experience so great that your cus...

Doing best what matters most to the customer

By TLF Research

It’s official – the most successful organisations are going soft – they’re becoming human again! They’ve remembered, ‘just in time’ (no pun intended), that ultimately business is about people – it’s about human beings, being human. The key assets of most organisations are not the buildings people work in, or the equipment and machines people o...

I'll have the same again please - Why Consistency Matters

By Rachel Allen, Client Manager, TLF Research

Millions of people travel frequently to London, some for business, others for pleasure. For those who need to stay overnight, there are literally thousands of hotels to choose from so finding a room isn’t difficult. But talk to many of these visitors and you will discover that, by choice, they will always stay in the same hotel or the use the same chain time after time. These customers are &...

Do Customers Like Being Surveyed?

By Nigel Hill Founder of The Leadership Factor and editor of Customer Insight

If a company that you do business with writes to you, telephones or emails asking you to provide feedback on how satisfied you are with the service you’re getting from them, how do you react? Do you a. Regard it as totally unreasonable behaviour by the supplier? b. Feel that it shows they care about how you feel as a customer? c. See it as a pointless exercise that won’t make any di...

Customer service starts at the top

By TLF Research

Don Hales, Founder & Chairman of Judges of the National Customer Service Awards has had the opportunity to study at close quarters customer service in many leading organisations in every service sector. He is convinced that the secret to great customer service lies in leadership. He has linked with leading research organisation, Glowinkowski International to establish the behaviours of top cus...

Making The Grade

By TLF Research

City & Guilds is a household name that strives to stay on top of the game by reacting to and anticipating the needs of its customers. A customer satisfaction survey sits next to other research activity to feed information into ongoing initiatives to improve and make the process easier for customers. A mixture of innovation and concentrating on getting the basics right is paying steady dividend...

Rewarding Customer Satisfaction

By TLF Research

How do you feel after you've stayed at a hotel where you were treated like a VIP? Great, relaxed and happy! You book a return visit and you tell your friends about it. How do you feel after visiting a retail store where the sales representatives treated you as an "inconvenience" they had to deal with? Annoyed, dissatisfied and negative! You tell your friends and they tell other people too. Next ti...

10 Customer Centred Lessons

By TLF Research

Harvard Professor John Kotter, with the help of some old video clips of Jack Welch and other leaders addressing his Harvard students twenty years or so ago, asked us why some companies had become customer-centred over the past 25 years, but many had not. "Tom Peters (with Bob Waterman) was the first to say 'Customer, Customer, Customer,' in answer to the question 'What makes a company great over t...

Understanding financial implications of customer service

By TLF Research

My greatest claim to fame in the world of customer service is that seven years ago, assisted by my colleagues at Quest Media, I launched the National Customer Service Awards and I remain the chairman of judges for the programme to this day.Nowadays I combine that activity with speaking, writing and consulting on customer service and my specialist subject is helping people understand the financial ...

Maximising loyalty the publishers way

By Rachel Allen, Client Manager, TLF Research

Maximising loyalty the publishers’ way Readers of Stakeholder know the benefits of keeping customers highly satisfied. Whatever your favoured acronym or model, the message is the same - highly satisfied customers behave in a way that will benefit your business both in the short-term and long-term. As long you are able to keep them highly satisfied, that is. They will buy more, pay more, stay...

Holding on to Stakeholders when it hits the fan

By TLF Research

I am starring in a play and, just as the curtains start to roll back, I realise that a) I have learned the lines to the wrong play and, b) I am stark naked. Before the men in white coats come to take me away, let me say in my defence that this is apparently quite a common sort of dream for strange people like me - and that it is hardly surprising after years of working in crisis management. For a ...

Empowerment - How far dare you go?

By TLF Research

Empowerment is not a new concept in customer service but Don Hales, founder and chairman of the judges of the National Customer Service Awards, has discovered from this year's finals that more companies than ever are releasing staff from strict rules and providing more freedom to act on their own initiative, allowing them to provide real service in response to customer needs. But how far can you g...

Rating Scales in Customer Satisfaction Research

By Nigel Hill Founder of The Leadership Factor and editor of Customer Insight

1. Interval versus ordinal scales It is not unusual in satisfaction research to see simple verbal scales, where each point on the scale is given a verbal description (e.g. 'strongly agree', 'agree' or 'very satisfied', 'satisfied' etc). The problem is that such scales have only ordinal properties. They give an order from good to bad or satisfied to dissatisfied without quantifying it. In othe...

Fast Guide - Customer Service

By TLF Research

Peel back the layers and you will discover that at the heart of any successful business lies its customers - cosseted, consulted, listened to, respected and appreciated. They are the leaders, the catalysts for future development. As Sir Terry Leahy, Chief Executive, Tesco once remarked, “We follow the customer, if they change, we change.” Quality customer service is critical - it is th...

Annual customer satisfaction and loyalty conference 2006

By TLF Research

The Leadership Factor’s seventh annual conference on ‘customer satisfaction and loyalty’ took place on 2nd February. This year, like the most fickle of football fans, we abandoned Man Utd. (location for last year’s conference) and took up with Chelsea. Robert kicked off (sorry!) the day by introducing the ICS and its work, covering the ICS model for world class customer ser...

SOCAP in Europe's Annual Conference

By TLF Research

Of huge interest was the first day appearance of Rachel Elnaugh as keynote speaker. Rachel had been booked before the much publicised collapse of Red Letter Days and it is testament to her courage that she didn’t cancel despite a further hauling over the coals the previous Friday, this time on Tonight with Trevor McDonald. SOCAPie CEO, Derek Williams decided to run the slot as a question and...

UK Customer Experience Awards

By TLF Research

Customer service is frequently quoted as being the most important factor in today’s economic climate in the battle to win, retain and grow customers. The importance of customer service cannot be underestimated but Awards International, a company that specialises in award programmes, believes that what really counts for customers in deciding where to spend their money is what it feels like to...

Conference - European Customer Experience World

By Sarah Stainthorpe, Client Manager, TLF Research

The European Customer Experience World conference was held at the Radisson, Heathrow Airport on the 20th and 21st May. The focus was ‘delivering a great customer experience while improving operational performance’. Here are just some of the case studies outlined at the conference… Why is a clear vision important? A company’s vision needs to recognise the link between the...

ECEW - Conference 2011

By Greg Roche, Director, TLF Research

This year’s conference was held at the Sofitel Hotel at Heathrow and, as usual, featured a large array of interesting and varied speakers. This article highlights some of the most interesting speakers who made the strongest points about how to improve business performance through a strong focus on customer experience. Amongst the most enlightening was Anthony Thompson, founder and Chairman o...

Complaint Research Data - True or False?

By TLF Research

On 25th October 1946 at 8.30pm in room H3, the Gibbs Building, King’s College, Cambridge, an emotion-laden, and some say violent, encounter took place between the rival philosophers Popper and Wittgenstein . To this day no one can agree what happened between them in a meeting that lasted just 10 minutes. This is all the more astonishing because the events took place in front of an audience o...

15th Annual Customer Satisfaction & Loyalty Conference

By Nigel Hill, Founder of TLF Research and Editor of Customer Insight

Wednesday March 12th saw nearly 200 senior managers and customer insight professionals sampling some excellent chocolate chip cookies prior to the start of TLF’s 15th annual Customer Satisfaction and Loyalty Conference at The Institution of Civil Engineers’ head office in Westminster. One Great George St is a magnificent Grade II listed, four-domed, Edwardian building. In its splendid ...

TLF Annual Conference - Customer Satisfaction and Loyalty

By TLF Research

First up was Linda Wallace from Richmond Housing Partnership (RHP), a major London social landlord, owning and managing more than 8,500 homes in Richmond & Hounslow. The company has 220 staff and an annual turnover of £33m. Housing associations are ‘not for profit’ businesses with a remit to provide affordable quality homes to less advantaged members of society. The average r...

Complaint Handling

By Rachel Allen, Client Manager, TLF Research

Why are complaints valuable? It’s a cliché, for good reason, but complaints provide businesses with some real opportunities. For a start, a complaint gives you a chance to see your organisation through the eyes of a customer. By pointing out flaws and weaknesses you are being given a chance to make corrections and improve your performance. By improving performance customers will be mo...

The Gospel according to Carl (Sewell)

By Nigel Hill Founder of The Leadership Factor and Editor of Customer Insight Magazine

When Carl Sewell joined the family firm in 1967 it was third out of three Cadillac dealerships in Dallas. Today it’s the biggest in America, $450million big, and all built on Sewell’s Ten Commandments of Customer Service. His principles work across the full market spectrum from Chevvys to Cadillacs and from Hyundais to Lexuses and will almost certainly apply just as well to solicitors,...

ICS Annual Conference 2010

By Stephen Hampshire, Client Manager, TLF Research

The green end of a hard winter ICS annual conference 2010 A new beginning... ...the renaissance of customer service The economy, predictably enough, was high on the agenda at this year's ICS conference. That didn't mean that it was depressing, with one exception, but it did make you wonder about the "green shoots" featured on the front of the delegate pack. The conference was entitled "a new be...

Tattoo You: Super Loyalty

By TLF Research

Ask a Harley-Davidson senior executive what they sell and you'll get the answer. And it's not motorbikes. "We sell to 43-year-old accountants the ability to dress in leather, ride through small towns and have people be afraid of them," says Harley-Davidson VP John Russell. Harley-Davidson executives love repeating this quote. It first appeared, to our knowledge, in the book Results-Based Leadershi...

Customer Insight

Category: Customer Experience